President Donald Trump had cruel words for a female reporter who recently asked him some uncomfortable questions: “Quiet, piggy.”
While talking to members of the press on Air Force One late last week, Bloomberg News correspondent Catherine Lucey sought to press Trump on the continued confidentiality of the files pertaining to deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s case. That remark was his response.
In the Oval Office several days later, he reprimanded another reporter, Mary Bruce of ABC News, for asking Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman about the 2018 death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi – a violent end that U.S. intelligence officials say was carried out on Salman’s orders. Trump called hers “a horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question.” When Bruce then asked about the Epstein files herself, Trump called her “a terrible person and a terrible reporter.”
His intent in both contexts is clear: Shame reporters, women especially, into shutting up. Make them feel ugly, unqualified and unintelligent – or perhaps even endangered – so they no longer feel empowered to press him on difficult subjects. To speak at all. Do so publicly and on camera, to worsen the humiliation.
Of course, lobbing insults – puerile ones especially – at those viewed as dissenters, naysayers, or competition is nothing new to Trump. Anyone with even a passing interest in political discourse will be familiar with his lengthy list of dim-witted nicknames for such individuals.
But when it’s women who challenge him, the pushback becomes all at once more cutting, and more shallow. (This pattern, too, is well-documented.) There is plenty that could be said, in a broader sense, about the ways in which fascist rulers like Trump create an ideal of visual conformity and then shame those who deviate from it, particularly those who already have less privilege to fall back upon – all as a means of taking more control over how people act and speak.
Only… it’s not working now. Especially not on women.
Even Republican women are refusing the silent option these days. Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina – three individuals who have been more than happy to tow Trump’s hateful lines in the past – are now pushing back when it comes to the Epstein case, both in words and votes. It’s pushback the Trump administration has branded as “hostile” and traitorous.
Greene addressed Trump’s treatment of the matter in a recent social media post. “Aggressive rhetoric attacking me has historically led to death threats and multiple convictions of men who were radicalized by the same type of rhetoric being directed at me right now. This time by the President of the United States,” she wrote of “the man I supported and helped get elected.”
She added: “I now have a small understanding of the fear and pressure the women who are victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his cabal must feel.”
One could argue that Greene is simply now being asked to lie in a bed of her own making – but the threat, the danger, the attempts to silence all extend well beyond her. Yet so does the refusal to give into that pressure from the top to shut up. In recent days, both ABC’s Bruce and Bloomberg’s Lucey have continued to report on the Epstein files, which contain information about the various powerful figures who might have sought Epstein’s sex-trafficking services.
It’s wrongdoing that saw women’s lives ruined – women who also refuse to be silent. It’s wrongdoing that will come to light, as a bill to release those files makes its way at last to Trump’s desk, as of publication.
It’s wrongdoing that, no matter the attempts to pressure women into ceasing to speak or even ask about it, won’t be brushed aside. ◼️
